Marian’s 65th birthday present to herself was a Vespa. A pink one. Very sensible purchase, she said, because it gets 80 mpg.

I admit she looks ultra cool in her matching pink helmet and her pink leathers. I’m not sure she needs the leathers for her jaunts around the neighborhood, but she loves wearing the full getup. She calls out to people she passes, shouting, “. . .

The electric pink Vespa frantically wove through the stalled traffic between Seattle and Tacoma…Sassy looked behind her fearing the the driver of the Hummer would find a way to bully its way through the other cars in pursuit of her and the contents of the black book.

I was working in Italy back in 2000. I was inspecting and auditing C-Band antennas. I took a day off and visited Rome. I was standing at a crossing and the light turned red. I waited–there was no curb. The streets were filled with HUNDREDS of scooters–mostly Vespas. One guy ran over my toes. I am sure he felt the ‘buimp’ in the road. He just kept going.

Almost sliding off the dirt road in my rush to stop, I reached into the mail box without seeing the vespas swarming the car. Too many to count landed on my arm and stung hard. In a couple of seconds I was short of breath and trembling. Putting the key in my front door required effort and I saw my hand shaking. I was heading into a trance.

Vespa GS – 160 cc’s that produced the maximum horsepower allowed for a 14-year-old in North Miami, Florida. The freedom it provided was worth more than all the road rash and part-time jobs I took on to make the weekly payments to the stepfather it allowed me to escape.

Met man in Vespa T-shirt married him three years later. Seven years down the line moved to a little town in Italy that borders Slovenia. You’d think inhabitants of border towns are a tad more astute than your average native. Nay my friend. They speak to me in German.